According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2015, costs for slip-and-fall accidents to Medicare alone totaled over $31 billion. This total does not include legal or non-Medicare related costs. The total expense resulting from slip-and-fall injuries in the United States is estimated to be approximately $100 million per day. According to the CDC, in 2008 more than 8.5 million Americans sustained injuries from an unintentional slip or fall—the leading cause of all nonfatal injuries treated in U.S. hospital emergency rooms. Common causes of slip-and-fall accidents include improper maintenance of walking and common areas, lack of cleanliness on floors leading to slippery surfaces when wet, and failure to clean floors after water or food spillage.
Slip and fall injuries are frequently associated with wet floors. Customers typically encounter such wet floors in the restroom of a facility, and employees frequently encounter such wet surfaces in a work area, such as a kitchen of a restaurant, for example. These injuries can result in numerous general liability and/or workers compensation claims.
Conventional techniques for evaluating floor conditions are complicated and expensive and are prone to human error. The cost and the effort involved in evaluating floor conditions makes the occurrence of such readings less frequent. This results in fewer safety readings being taken and a lack of alerts when dangerous floor conditions exist.
Most facilities depend on staff and janitorial contractors to self-report when they perform cleaning operations, typically via a hand-written log posted in an area designated for routine cleaning (e.g., a bathroom). This system is prone to human error and uncertain accuracy. It also requires manual effort to first enter the information and then to key it into an electronic format for management reporting. If a scheduled cleaning is not performed, it may be unlikely that a manager will discover such fact until much later, if at all.
There is a continued need in the art to provide additional solutions to help promote the cleanliness of facilities used by the public and to reduce the occurrence of slip-and-fall injuries. For example, there is a continued need for techniques for improving the ability to monitor the cleaning practices within a facility.
It will be appreciated that this background description has been created by the inventor to aid the reader, and is not to be taken as an indication that any of the indicated problems were themselves appreciated in the art. While the described principles can, in some respects and embodiments, alleviate the problems inherent in other systems, it will be appreciated that the scope of the protected innovation is defined by the attached claims, and not by the ability of any disclosed feature to solve any specific problem noted herein.